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Starship Surya is set towards the end of Enterprise’ five-year mission depicted in the show. The golden age of exploration is in its latter years, though there is plenty of time for our stories. Overall things are not much different from when Kirk and crew set out. Aggressive diplomacy has given the Federation a huge volume of space, and other than the centre and the edges much of it is still unknown.
Still, some of the lines have been filled in. The Member’s Area, the core region where the principal member planets of the UFP are found, is well known; the borders of Federation space are well surveyed, and disputes with neighbours are a matter of dozens of light-years. Major Starbases have been build to support the Fleet, and bubbles of detail surround each of them.
Whereas once a captain would forge ahead into uncharted territory, with no more data than his sensors could provide as to what lay ahead, now major space-lanes connect each sector. Most of the stars and many of the planets are well plotted, though the details of those systems have barely been scratched. A network of base stations and subspace relays has been contructed; no longer can a starship Captain find himself completely out of communications range. Even the most backwater system claimed by the Federation is no more than 48 hours distant for subspace radio, and on average a message arrives with six. Captains must still be able to make decisions without Fleet oversight – six hours each way plus time to decide is too long to wait in most cases – but now the Star Fleet at least knows what their ships are doing.
The Star Fleet itself is changing. The older Texas, Baton Rouge and Republic spacewarp ships are mostly retired or mothballed; the new starship class vessels – Hermeses, Suryas and Constitutions – have finally been built in sufficient numbers to take over all roles. Ships intended mostly for combat – Saladin-class destroyers and Federation-class dreadnoughts – have been built to guard the borders. And new designs are on the drawing boards. The structure of the Fleet has evolved – more ranks, more divisions. The era of the swashbuckling captain with only his own ship and own resources, supreme but for God, has not ended. But the change is coming; centralised control, fleet oversight and bureaucracy will be here before the current crop of Ensigns make Admiral.
For my setting I’ve drawn principally on The Original Series, of course; I’m also a fan of the Animated Series and will incorporate elements from that. The wider political structure of the galaxy is taken mostly from the setting for Star Fleet Battles, a wargame first written in the 1970’s. As a result, noting in the Star Fleet Universe matches anything made since TAS, and the continuities are very different. This is not the SFU, however; I am not going to tell stories set in the General War. Other movies and shows are more or less ignored. We are headed towards the movie era, but I don’t expect to get there, and probably will want more time in between than the movies allow. TNG and later is quite irrelevant, of course; and since I disliked what I saw of Enterprise, that has been chucked right in the bin.
The goal is to have the stories stand alone, without fretting about canon. I want them to be enjoyable, and internally consistent; I don’t try to pretend they match anything else.
I hope you like them.
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